Let’s stop talking and planning violence

Many Nigerian politicians these days are talking and planning, not elections, but violence. Some are threatening war by their own particular nationalities against all other nationalities of Nigeria. Some are issuing threats of religious wars, though in veiled phrases. Altogether, it seems as if, come mid-February, the real event in Nigeria is not going to be elections but horrific conflicts and pogroms.

As the rest of the world absorbs these fearsome vibrations from Nigeria, worldwide apprehension about Nigeria has risen to fever pitch. What one would describe as the peak came early this week when the American Secretary of State, John Kerry, hurried to Nigeria to appeal to Nigerian rulers and leaders to stop planning for violence and start planning for free, fair and peaceful elections. If the government of America feels compelled to take that kind of action, then the situation must be a lot worse than most of us, ordinary Nigerians, know.

It is therefore critically important for us all to warn our politicians. Tempers are such in Nigeria these days that if violence starts as is being threatened and planned, it is very likely to develop to extents beyond the wildest imaginations of any Nigerian and any Nigerian political leader. In country after country in Black Africa, political violence usually starts small, but by igniting pent-up angers, fears and hostilities, it then sets up horrendous conflagrations that seem to go on forever – often consuming and destroying lives and properties indiscriminately. Nigeria is more combustible today than most Nigerian politicians seem to know or care to know. They are wrong in thinking that another Nigerian civil war will proceed and end neatly, or be spatially limited, like our first civil war.

It will help if our politicians watch videos on the civil wars that have wracked the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Congo-Kinshasa) off and on since 1960. The political storm started as a small incident a few days after the celebration of independence. Then it rolled forward and ballooned out until it engulfed most of the country, led to the assassination of its first Prime Minister, generated a viciously corrupt military dictatorship, and then concatenated in an even larger second civil war. This second war became so massive that it involved all the countries of Central Africa and became known as “Africa’s World War”. An estimated 5.4 million people have died in this war – the largest human casualties of any one war since the Second World War of 1939-45. Today, in spite of United Nations and African Union peace-keeping efforts, rebel forces are still alive in parts of this country.

I have academic colleagues who saw some parts of the Rwanda genocide of 1994. As they tell it, there was not much of a sign of impending trouble in the days before. But once the mass killings started, it was as if everybody had long been preparing to kill their neighbours. Within days, virtually everybody in sight was a machete-wielding desperado and killer. A journalist on the spot reported, “There are no devils left in hell; all of them are on duty in Rwanda”. Within 90 days, over 750,000 people had been killed, and over two million had been forced to flee from their homes.

Virtually every country of Black Africa is prone to these political wild fires. Last week, I told the story of the mass killings now in progress among the 40 different nationalities of South Sudan where, in only two years of independence, between 50,000 and 100,000 people have been slaughtered. Somalia slowly slid into confusion in 1991, and it continues to live in that disorder till today. A few days ago, the United Nations and the African Union agreed to increase the number of international peace-keeping forces in Somalia. The political hurricane goes on and on all over Black Africa, generating horrific destruction, loss of lives, and blood-curdling human deprivation and suffering.

The truth behind these patterns of madness is that our Black African countries are very fragile. The disorientation started when our various peoples were forced into countries that were not their own choosing; and it has become very profound in our time. Our peoples feel trapped and deprived, and are therefore often on edge. Little conflicts have a tendency to blow up into mammoth disasters. Therefore, it is a serious crime to start violence in any of our countries – because it is impossible to tell how far and wide it will go.

As I have said in various ways in this column, the disorientation of our many peoples in Nigeria has been compounded by the folly of concentrating power and resource-control in the so-called “federal government”. We have called into being a demon that we can never, on our own, peacefully send away. No Nigerian who enters into the limitless powers of the presidency and the limitless ocean of money under the president’s control can ever choose to do the right thing and return Nigeria to a sane federation. The disorientation, sense of loss, anger, bitterness and mutual animosity among our various peoples have risen very high and are escalating fearfully at this point. It is therefore a very wrong time for our politicians to play with any idea of conflict.

Whatever else they may choose to do with our country, our political leaders must seriously commit themselves to the avoidance of violent conflicts. The candidates in the coming presidential election have agreed to conduct their election campaigns, and run the election itself, in peace, and to prevail on their supporters and activists to do the same. We do not see the effects of that agreement in the conduct of the campaigns yet. Threats of violence are still being hurled from virtually all sides, and politically motivated conflicts are still being reported in various places. The informed world still continues to worry. Governments and international agencies are considering how to help Nigeria to prevent violent conflicts generated by election.

But whatever help the international community may offer, it is we Nigerians that must bear the ultimate responsibility for the destiny of Nigeria. In the context of our senseless accumulation of power and resource-control into the federal centre, we have evolved a political culture that conceives of elections as do-or-die wars. If we really intend to sort out the future of this country in a peaceful manner, we must get rid of this essentially criminal approach to elections.

For our 2007 elections, many countries and international agencies sent pre-election observers, and then sent countless observer teams at election time. Yet, we made that election one of the most criminally rigged elections in our history. I fear that we are going to do exactly like that with our February election – and that if we do, we will almost certainly have the violent conflicts that the world fears. And judging from the moods of these times, I fear that the violence of 2015 may be our final folly together. Those thinking of rigging elections, and those thinking of responding with violence – both are, in the atmosphere of today, planning to ride on a tiger’s back, and they are taking the risk of ending up in the tiger’s belly.